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Writers plan their stories before they start writing so that they know what is going to happen. Planning is an important part of writing a good story.

Watch this short clip to get some ideas about how to plan a story and what to include.

Writers call the main events that happen in a story the plot. A story mountain is a useful way to organise your plot.

Watch the following clip to learn about what a story mountain is.

1. Opening - Start your story with an interesting main character and decide where the story is going to take place.

For example: There is a knight who lives in a peaceful village.

2. Build up - What is going to happen in your story? Add in some problems or a mystery to solve.

For example: An evil wizard kidnaps the king.

3. Problem - Pick what problem your main character is going to have to overcome. Maybe a dragon or an evil wizard is causing problems in the town?

For example: The wizard has a fire breathing dragon locked up guarding his lair.

4. Resolution - How does your character deal with the problem? How will they solve it?

For example: The knight releases the dragon from his chains, giving him his freedom. In thanks the dragon assists the knight. The knight finds the king and the dragon eats the wizard!

5. Ending - What happens to your character? You could add an unexpected twist!

For example: The dragon and knight become allies and friends and return the king back to his throne. The whole kingdom rejoices.

Look at this picture of two astronauts in space.

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Imagine you are one of the astronauts in the picture. Write at least five sentences saying what you can see, hear, smell and feel.Try and write interesting sentences that include describing words.

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Top tip!

Use your imagination. You could describe things that would be in that setting but that can’t be seen in the picture.

You are going to create a story based on the picture you chose in Activity 2.

First, draw out your story mountain and add labels to show where the opening, build-up, problem, resolution and ending should go. Like this:

Next to your labels, write notes giving more information. Use the questions below to help you.

Opening: Who is your character? Why are they there? What are they like?

Build up: What happens to your character?

Problem: What problem do they have to overcome? Maybe you introduce a ‘baddie’ here?

Resolution: How does your character fix the problem?

Ending: Is there a twist? Does everything turn out ok?

Top tip!

You can watch the story mountain video again to help remind you about what to include in each section.

This is just the plan, so you do not need to write in full sentences yet.

Now write your story using your story mountain plan.

It does not have to be a very long story, but you need to make sure that you include each part of the story mountain.

Aim to:

• write each section of the story mountain as a new paragraph
• write at least two sentences per paragraph
• use describing words to describe your character and setting
• use full stops and capital letters correctly